Guardian’s catastrophism leads circulation to plummet ?

Apparently, crazy non-factual opinion just doesn’t sell all that well. Kind of reminds me of the doomed “Air America” radio network.

Climate resistance writes:

There are of course a number of reasons for the decline of ‘dead tree media’, one of which is the rise of Internet-based media. However, the internet had been around for a decade before the series above begins, during which time sales were stable, or possibly even showed an improvement.

This one graph tells the story:

However, I prefer a different explanation. All newspapers have lost sales. But the Independent and Guardian have suffered more than average, and I don’t believe their catastrophism is coincidental.

Disasterologist media like the Guardian have seen their day come and gone. Perhaps in a way highlighting sites like this one who fought against the AGW tide, growing, more relevant, and thriving. How times have changed.

The Guardian is so desperate for money that its just carried out a fire sale of some of its profitable parts. Its sold AutoTrader to a private equity firm, netting nearly $1bn over a series of sales. The great thing is that it has done so using a secretive company based in the Cayman Islands so is avoiding tax, the same tax that it lambasts Amazon and Starbucks for avoiding. Both Guardian and Amazon et al use legal methods of minimising their tax, however the Guardian’s is Ok, Amazon’s is evil – the logic of the left.

The Times and the Telegraph need to be plotted for the comparison (as stated on the blog comments).

Also, why does the Indy collapse in late 2011 and how many of their readers switched to the Guardian instead of giving up on left wing papers?

For me the problem came about because the editorial line is influenced by their readers’ comments in the online version. As the censorship became more stringent their feedback became more skewed. So they circled themselves like the Oozlum Bird.

Perhaps, that is the point. They obtain a small clientele but a focussed clientele. Such a clientele is easy to sell to marketing companies.
If you want lentil-eating, hemp-wearing insurance executives come hither!

I think his graph would be a little bit more informative if he also put the Times, the Telegraph, and the Daily mail on that chart. Then we would have a better idea if this drop was systemic, or just confined to the more leftist papers.

On one analysis I’ll be sorry to see the Guardian go because it was an important voice for liberty once. And in my youth “Newspaper” and “Guardian” were synonyms. Now I can’t stand the wretched rag, except for the Cryptic Crossword, still the best in the business.

I think it’s really sad that a once great newspaper is falling on hard times. The newspaper media in the UK is saturated with right wing leaning papers with the Guardian being one of the few papers that takes a more liberal view. It’s partially a result of online news resources. Having said that I personally am deeply disappointed in it’s heavy handed moderation/censorship of comments in their online sections. They advertise that ‘comment is free’, it patently is not, and as a life long Guardian reader it pains me to see what has happened. The Guardian was once a champion of freedom of expression, currently it is almost impossible to follow the debate in some areas due to the dreaded censors red pen.

Many years ago the Manchester Guardian was a Liberal paper. It had some honour. Then it moved its business to London.
The only thing keeping the Guardian group going is its part ownerhip of AutoTrader – a magazine dedicated to the selling of second hand CO2 guzzling polluting cars.

In defence of the Guardian:
•The cryptic crossword and the daily quiz are fun
•The economic coverage is very good from a left-wing viewpoint It is a left-wing paper)
•The sports coverage is good for the north of England (online comments after a Liverpool game are more enlightening than all the other UK press experts)
•Generally, other than their environment section, online disagreement is allowed and challenged vigorously.

I have no defence for the Guardian environment section… not since Dana imported SkS censorship policies.

You have to laugh or you’d cry. This is the paper that had it’s banana and pea nut milk shake yearning journalist adventurers, on the ‘Ship of Fools’ the MV Akademik Shokalskiy which got stuck in Antarctic sea ice that wasn’t meant to be there due to AGW.

It’s also the broad sheet that harbours the AGW zealot Dana ‘Toxic’ Nuccitelli

The Wall Street Journal remains the top daily newspaper in the country with a total average circulation of 2,378,827 (March 2013), a 12.3% increase from 2,118,315 (March 2012), according to the latest figures released by the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM).

The people who believe the “We are Running OUT!!!” and distroying the planet tripe they pedal will stop “killing the trees” buying newspapers (as their propaganda is self consuming) and move to “sucking their own exhaust” web sites.

The people who think independently and clearly will be driven off by their left leaning spin.

Who is left to buy?…

Maybe some libraries and the BBC and a few other “institutions” that have not yet figured out the papers in the lobby are not being of benefit? Pretty thin soup…

Good news. The Guardian is a horrendous rag, it asserts its position as champion of the poor whilst condescending them. Its articles can always be reduced to simple narratives of goodies and baddies. Many of its journalists only life experience comes from Student Union bars and sociology textbooks.

In saying that, I think the fall in circulation should be viewed in light of online viewership. The other point, I suspect, is that younger readers are less concerned with detail and more with overall opinion. I suspect more readers seek confirmation of their own world view, and yes the Guardian as traditional press is probably as close as there is, its articles are still more nuanced that many news sites and single issue blogs.

I think the biggest issue facing news papers is their pricing. The average daily has fewer pages overall and even less devoted to actual stories. Ads comprise an ever increasing percentage of the printed pages. So it’s hard for the average person to justify paying more for less substance.

They seem to have fallen into the idea, wrongly, that because of declining subscriptions they need to increase prices. They don’t seem to understand that increasing prices leads to declining subscriptions. So instead of looking hard at the real reasons they lay blame elsewhere, which in most cases is the “new kid on the block”, i.e. the internet.

As it has already been said, “Having said that I personally am deeply disappointed in it’s heavy handed moderation/censorship of comments in their online sections. They advertise that ‘comment is free’, it patently is not, and as a life long Guardian reader it pains me to see what has happened. The Guardian was once a champion of freedom of expression, currently it is almost impossible to follow the debate in some areas due to the dreaded censors red pen.” I can only add that I won’t bother commenting at the Guardian either.

Strong and systematic bias that eschews all meaningful discussion of balanced reality stops people showing up to give you money. Doh!

That precipitous drop in late 2011 doesn’t seem apparent in the other graph referenced
by one blogger. Of course, being color blind, I eternally curse those who produce graphs and use colors – an amateur at work – colors should never be used to impart information – unless those colors can be distinguished by those with color deficiencies (blue and yellow are never mistaken
by anyone). Dotted, dashed, segemented,labelled, etc lines are the way to display graphical data when several lines are on the same graph.

I believe you may have it backwards. It is well known that newspaper circulation has been in general decline across the board. My take is that the decline in revenue in the early 2000s led to layoffs of journalists which led to a decline in quality of reporting. This, in turn, led to using more sensationalistic headlines to increase readership and revenues. As the headlines became more sensational and unbelievable, more and more of the readership abandoned these papers. The only thing keeping them in circulation now is that newsprint still costs less than regular paper if you plan on using it to line your pet’s litter box, or the bottom of their cage.

I think it’s really sad that a once great newspaper is falling on hard times. The newspaper media in the UK is saturated with right wing leaning papers with the Guardian being one of the few papers that takes a more liberal view.
================================================
For a certain value of “liberal”.
And define “right wing”.

There is a feeling that things on the Internet should be available free of charge. I think this has doomed the newspaper. As we move to digital media we don’t want to pay. We may want to donate but that is vastly different and more personally rewarding.

Guardian was not alone in its blind support for all things CAGW – all MSM have been complicit & suffered some decline as a consequence. fortunately, there will soon be nothing CAGW left to report:

23 Jan: Bloomberg: Alesandro Vitelli: EU Ban on UN Carbon May Flag End of Offset Market, Nomisma Says
A proposed European Union ban on the use of United Nations carbon credits in its emissions market may signal the end of the international offset market, according to energy consultant Nomisma Energia srl…
Factories in the EU’s carbon market have been able since 2008 to offset a portion of their pollution limits with credits generated by projects in the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism. The price for UN-overseen credits slumped 98 percent in the past six years, reducing the incentive for nations to invest in less-polluting energy in developing economies.
“The EU decision might be the end of the CDM as a market,” Matteo Mazzoni, an analyst at Nomisma Energia in Bologna, Italy, said in a phone interview today. “There will still be some trading and people will try to extract something from their investments in projects, but without any new demand there isn’t much of a market anyway.” …
Trade in UN Certified Emission Reductions dropped 70 percent to 464 million metric tons in 2013 after hitting a record 1.57 billion tons in 2012, according to data from ICE Futures Europe exchange in London…
“It’s disappointing that there’s no international offsets after 2020,” even from the least-developed nations, said Andrei Marcu, senior adviser at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. “That will put a dampener on investment in emission-reduction projects” and potentially on carbon-cutting programs in emerging nations, he said…http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/eu-ban-on-un-carbon-may-flag-end-of-offset-market-nomisma-says.html

People no longer accept ‘one-way’ media these days, the ‘comments’ are now as important as the article. The Guardian is utterly ruthless in its sterilisation of opposing views from comments pages, therefore it has become one dimensional, and more to the point it betrays its fundamental insecurity about the views and opinions it promotes. Did I hear somewhere that George Soros was propping it up or did I just dream that?

I think the problem is that these people really do believe, they will sink with their ship. They behave in this way because they believe their view of the world is more compassionate, more broad minded and more in touch with the world than other people (who do not read the Guardian or Independent). Under their compassion is a sneer, narrow mindedness and self-belief, and they are so cocooned this this bubble of imagined make beleive reality that they fail to understand they have lost the plot. When I meet these people I don’t debate with them because I know as soon as I declare an opinion that is not allied to their belief system they will switch off without trying to understand my point of view.

Think Monbiot and you have the Guardian mindset, think of a roomful of Monbiots and you have the Guardian readership.

The Independent’s collapse in sales may be due to their also publishing ‘The i ‘, tabloid format, very cheap and popular (still with a lot of the Indie’s prejudices and hobbyhorses but much more readable, and with a serious approach). ‘The i’ started off in October 2010 and the Indie’s fall started a few months later. Both are owned by the Russian oligarch Lebedev. ‘The i ‘ has a reasonable circulation (well, compared to the Indie), 293,946 in 2013. I personally think the Indie has collapsed because it’s just too boring for most people.

The Guardian has become the paper of bien-pensant metrolpolitan bourgeois intellectuals and its columnists are generally there to appeal to that audience, as an echo chamber of middle-class left ideology. With confidence in politicians at an all time low here in the UK and so many people seeking a different style of politics, the Guardian has only limited appeal, with its self-righteous attitudes and the classic approach of lecturing people (as well as their blatant censorship of any dissenting views).

I drink to the demise of both these rags but I will not hold my breath. The EU likes them because they unequivocally support its drive to ‘unify’ us.

I eventually cancelled my subscription to Time Magazine because the articles written by actual experts on the topics discussed were overrun by opinion pieces and regular columns by journalists who were generally clueless, or at least, knew far less about the topics they wanted to discuss, than I did. If I wanted that sort of “expertise” I could chat to people in a bar.

certainly Alok Jha’s latest Guardian report on the Turney Fiasco was the worst of the coverage. UK Independent isn’t a lot better – shhh….don’t mention CAGW – but a couple of bits that are new:

22 Jan: UK Independent: Steve Connor: Communication breakdown on board the Akademik Shokalskiy blamed for the ship being stranded in Antarctic ice over Christmas
Serious questions have been raised about the behaviour of the expedition scientists who led a group of tourists and journalists onto the ice without properly planning for the rapid evacuation ordered by the ship’s captain as he became increasingly concerned about being trapped by sea ice…
Andrew Luck-Baker, a BBC radio producer who was one of the four journalists on the expedition, said that most of the 52 passengers were fee-paying tourists and there were chaotic scenes on the ice during the period when Captain Kiselev was trying to get them back to the ship.
“The expedition leaders could have some tough questions to face about logistical shortcomings that may have put the vessel at increased risk of becoming trapped. These were operational errors and mishaps during a visit by scientists and tourists to a location close to the Antarctic shore on 23 December,” Mr Luck-Baker said…
The expedition, which The Independent understands was sailing under a tourist permit rather than a research permit, has been criticised by some seasoned Antarctic scientists…
***Professor Turney said: “The timeline in the SMH article is inaccurate. I strongly reject any suggestion that I would knowingly put the safety of my team members at risk.”…http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/communication-breakdown-on-board-the-akademik-shokalskiy-blamed-for-the-ship-being-stranded-in-antarctic-ice-over-christmas-9078090.html

In my office in London in the late ’60’s I read the Telegraph and a colleague read the Guardian.
After an aeroplane crash the Telegraph headline was “97 passengers survive plane crash”
while the Guardian headline was “Three die in plane crash”.
I was prompted to ask my Guardian-reading colleague why he read such a miserable rag.

They both enjoyed some buoyancy ~2007-2009, low arctic ice and all that, but then 2009 climategate bent them down and now nature isn’t cooperating. They are at a stage where they are no longer reporting on actual planet Earth. How long will they follow this trend down? Already further than the BBC which is trying to claw its way back from the brink.

Boy, would I ever love to see the climategate release of a year ago still being held confidential. What if 10 million people each revealed just one word? Now that would be real ‘crowd sourcing’. Any adroit electronic wizards around that could figure this out?

The recent decline in UK papers may be partly due to the economy, which is also a very good “partly” due to the cretinistic green energy policy that is killing industry and squeezing the budgets of citizens. Probably the best way to increase circulation is for them to put out editions that weigh more – say a kilo or two. It would be used to burn in the stove in winter.

I have 2 newspapers thrown on my driveway everyday.
One is a left-leaning (by my view) major Chicago newspaper, the other is a more local newspaper.
It’s been close to 30 years that I’ve been reading the “major” paper, why quit now ?
This is Chicago, the politicians “all” eventually go to jail.

The Guardian’s dogmatic stance on man-made climate change indicates a lack of curiosity and adaptability, showing that in at least one respect they truly live up to their name. I’m reminded of their article “Climate change is happening too quickly for species to adapt” where the author is so sure and full of himself. The species will probably do well; The Guardian, who knows?

The Grauniad is the UK’s batty aunt living in her loft and prattling on about nothing by the hour to nobody in particular. The family reserves a space for her at dinner and then its back to the loft for more prattling. Ever was it so, so shall it ever be. God bless England – there shall never be another quite the likes of her.

I find this quote: “The awesome truth is that we are the last generation to enjoy the kind of climate that allowed civilisation to germinate, grow and flourish since the start of settled agriculture 11,000 years ago.”

Is actually telling. Mankind believes in the end of civilization as we know it – and then does everything humanly possible to get humans to self destruct by by demonizing life giving CO2. The solution to the end of life as we know it is to to make energy, which amplifies human effort to survive, too expensive for the poorest.

History will look back at this generation of dumb-asses and wonder how sheople could be so easily led into stupidity.

Quite simply the average Guardian reader is 70+. Very few young people read it. It belongs to a time when Marxism was a credible political alternative, when the Fabian Society was considered to be a force for good and not some sort of radical left-wing Orwellian group seeking to undermine democracy.It is a paper that denounces wealth and expects its readership to be part of “la revolution” Che Guevara style (even if they happen to be amongst the bourgeoisie themselves….)

All newspapers are dying, partly because they are “old hat” technology and partly because they are seen as being mouthpieces of the established political parties that are rapidly losing credibility. But in the case of the Guardian it is the readership that is literally dying, and not replaced by younger readers willing to be made to feel guilty for their Western levels of wealth on every page.

A word of warning!
There are those who would prefer if the plebs did not have access to the kind of communication that the net has given us over the past decade or so.
Just as the VCR was once a very simple device that could record anything on TV and the DVD player came along with its greater restrictions on recording. The newer devices for using the net are becoming somewhat the same. There are certain things that can’t be downloaded.
Will it be, that in 10 years from now, the devices we use to access the net won’t allow us to access certain sites or types of sites??
Keep your old laptops well oiled!!

dermot carroll says:
January 23, 2014 at 1:49 am
” … Will it be, that in 10 years from now, the devices we use to access the net won’t allow us to access certain sites or types of sites?? … ”
—-l
Heed the oracle :)

we buy newspapers or media outlets to tell us what is happening in the world. if we cannot trust that source, we look elsewhere for better and more reliable information. but the liberal media have still not understood that yet.

this is why the BBC is so widely despised and lampooned. it used to be a trusted media outlet, but now it is simply a joke.

even as the minor blog level, the same applies. i was reading a political blogger, who was quite insightful. but then we were getting blog posts from conspiracy-central, and 30% of readers left the site.

truth and honesty matters, any you are never going to get that from the independent or the grauniad.

DirkH says:
January 23, 2014 at 1:25 am
M Courtney says:
January 22, 2014 at 3:00 pm
“It is the Tabloids that rely on pictures. Whether of HRH The Duchess of Cornwall (Daily Heil)”

You are a crazy person. The Daily Mail was instrumental in the propaganda efforts against Germany during WW 2.

Ah, that will be the same paper who headlined with ‘Hurrah for the brownshirts’ and supports Marie La Pen’s fascist party in France and campaigned against the UK accepting Jewish refugees in WW2 . The Daily Fail is so right wing it sees Leftist tendencies in Mien Kampf.

View from the Solent says:
January 22, 2014 at 4:31 pm
Gareth Phillips says:
January 22, 2014 at 2:40 pm

I think it’s really sad that a once great newspaper is falling on hard times. The newspaper media in the UK is saturated with right wing leaning papers with the Guardian being one of the few papers that takes a more liberal view.
================================================
For a certain value of “liberal”.
And define “right wing”.

If you live in the UK and don’t understand those terms I’m afraid you are beyond my skills at teaching political thought.

M Courtney: “It is the Tabloids that rely on pictures. Whether of HRH The Duchess of Cornwall (Daily Heil) or the incredibly straight Kelly Brook (Star or Sun).”

Strange how the riders of the highest horses seem to come from the left. Personally, I like to read as many newspapers as possible but the household Newspaper of choice is the Daily Mail – whose short-comings and hyperbole I am aware of and quite capable of tuning out. However, I find your (and many of the left’s) ridiculous use of the title ‘Daily Heil’ to be on a par with warmists accusing me/us of being a ‘Denier’ (with all the subliminal meaning of that word): You do not insult the newspaper, you insult those who read it by associating them with the Socialist Fascists that used such greetings (Heil).

The chart shows The Guardian dropping from 350000 to 250000. Down about 2/7ths. Indendent is down from 200000 to 75000. Down by 5/8ths, which twice as bad as The Guardian. The article is wrong.
—-l
You might have misread the thrust of the article; the Guardian is not being compared to the Independant, both are being compared to other publications (which are not in the graph) : ” … All newspapers have lost sales. But the Independent and Guardian have suffered more than average … ”

I agree that with a cursory reading one might be left with an erroneous impression.

Ah, that will be the same paper who headlined with ‘Hurrah for the brownshirts’ and supports Marie La Pen’s fascist party in France and campaigned against the UK accepting Jewish refugees in WW2 . The Daily Fail is so right wing it sees Leftist tendencies in Mien Kampf.

Sorry, but your factual point is misdirected. DirkH cannot understand your point because he is, too.

“…The allusion to Nature’s Providence rules out humans as the agents in their own development: civilisation only exists because the weather was nice. The reality, of course, is precisely the opposite: civilisation exists because nature is indifferent to our discomfort, thus humans worked together to improve their condition.

“Vapid accounts of human history and the forces which shape it underpin vapid accounts of the contemporary world. Such analyses become less convincing. Hence the newspapers remain on the shelf…”

Exactly right. Some years ago, just before Christmas The Independent had a headline “Your Credit Cards Are Killing The Planet” After which I could no longer take them seriously.

Oh, and the decision by major papers to go to smaller type on smaller pages for “economy” was also daft. Let’s see, THE group most prone to reading papers was older folks, with decreasing vision. I know, lets make the type smaller…

It went from “I can read it without glasses” to “where are those glasses?…” so I just stopped bothering…

Harry Passfield says at January 23, 2014 at 2:57 am…
Please don’t be offended at my irreverent use of the established nickname for the Daily Mail. It was just an aside – not a comment on the readership.

The nicknames stick, not because they are always true, but because the fact they are sometimes true at all is remarkable.
The Indy was Independent (once)
The Torygraph does suppory the Tories (though its remaining readership seem to be UKIP)
The Grainiad does have terrible typos (including, allegedly, its own name)

And, sorry, the Daily Mail was impressed by 1930s Germany… that is remarkable.

M Courtney. That’ the problem with nicknames. The one Guy Gibson had for his dog has long since dropped from general useage. That’s the thing: some are just insulting, the best are humorous. In that vein I accept the examples you gave but I would add that, as much as it has been accepted that the old Guardian has moved from liberal to hard left, it seems to be accepted that the DM can’t throw off it’s 30’s orientation – which was a lot to do with influence owners had on their editors in those days. As an example, I once considered myself C of Heath. But then, we tend to grow up…

Air America was the name of a Vietnam era drug smuggling operation by our government. Mel Gibson starred in a movie of the same name about the smugglers. Was the naming of the radio channel a coincidence?

This post should serve as a reminder to everyone that we CAN change the media by making our choices known. For example, I refuse to watch, access or knowingly use resources from: The Weather Channel, The Weather Underground (yuck), MSNBC, CNN, USA Today, NYT, WaPo, LA Times, The Guardian, NBCCBSABC News, …

And by letting their sponsors know that we don’t use those media any longer, we will ultimately quicken their demise.

The Daily Fail is so right wing it sees Leftist tendencies in Mien Kampf.

Say. Didn’t the writer of that book go on to become a National Socialist? Ah I forget. Socialism is a right wing movement. Real leftists are Communists and sing the Internationale. As opposed to some National anthem.

I think the implied slur on the Daily Mail is rather wide of the mark.

I think you will find that Hitler was a lentil-eating vegitarian socialist (check the name of his party), who shares (shared) a rabid anti-sematism that is only matched by the modern Hampstead inteligentsia of the Liberal Left.

Do you remember the march by lefty feminists, shouting “we are all Hamas now”. Do these nutters have any clue what they are saying??

Still 200 K Kook Aid drinking Marxists who imbibe the cult of warm’s warmed-over urine er science ? Sad really. Who ever said that public education would lift the intelligence of the ‘masses’ was quite mistaken. These people should not be allowed to vote.

“Think Monbiot and you have the Guardian mindset, think of a roomful of Monbiots and you have the Guardian readership.”

Interestingly, George Monbiot flew over to the Daily Mail last week and did a column on the recent flooding. I thought it was odd behavior in view of his view of that newspaper. Last year he was ranting on about the poor quality of its weather forecasters or something. But perhaps the Moonbat is currently thinking of leaving the sinking ship.

As Crosspatch said above, the WSJ is holding it’s own. Frankly, that’s the only paper I’d bother reading, anymore. Sure, I can get right/libertarian opinion in a million different places, but the WSJ is the only place I see offering up hard news, anymore. Same for the WSJ-Live channel on my Roku.

richardscourtney says:
January 23, 2014 at 3:32 am
“While I was typing my post to you (at January 23, 2014 at 3:29 am) DirkH was providing his post (at January 23, 2014 at 3:27 am) which proved my point!”

Interestingly you don’t refute my argument; but don’t bother trying.
All grand new political schemes of the 30ies were socialist because socialism was the shiny new thing. From FDR over Mussolini who started his career as a socialist to Stalin; even Churchill had welfare state leanings.

That socialism today looks like a rotten zombie with genocidal tendencies is not my fault so don’t blame me for it.

Have you seen how Fox News channel is beating the progressive news channels by big numbers? Not a coincidence. The majority of functionally literate humans, and even many who aren’t, (literate or human) in this country aren’t buying the progressive media line anymore. By the way, the Air America disaster was partly due to their under capitalization, financial scandals, and a huge marketing mistake. They failed to position themselves effectively against their real competition.

I don’t need to. I would only hinder the enjoyment of people laughing at your so-called “argument”.

Similarly, my question (at January 23, 2014 at 6:16 am ) to M Simon provides all that needs to be said in response to the idiocy of him and Silver Ralph who seem to think they made a point (yes, they really do!).

Our local rag (The Kansas City Star) has also experienced a large drop in circulation in recent years. You can blame the one-sided, unbalanced left-wing editorial policy. You can blame the foolishness of trying to cater to millennials who didn’t prefer to get their news from print. You can blame the nation’s demographics — the generation that prefers to read the daily paper is dieing off.

But I blame the funny pages. Years ago, the paper decided the daily comics needed more diversity. Political correctness triumphed over entertainment (it’s the comics, for crying out loud!). One columnist responded to complaints about the comics by saying “Family Circus” might be offensive to some readers, so we had no reason to complain about comics actual readers actually found offensive..

I think one of the reasons WUWT and similar sites are “thriving” and others are not is that you can comment on this site without having to sign in through facebook or yahoo or google or some other account where every comment you make across every site you go can be added into a nice big file that can be used to “categorize” who you are and what you stand for – whether or not their pigeon hole fits you or not. I gave up making comments on many sites simply because of that. Is that true? Maybe not, but the one thing I have learned in this life is that whatever can be used to do harm – no matter how much good it can do – will be used to harm, not help as there is always more money to be made hurting people than helping them. The debate on climate change being an obvious example.

I was born and raised in Manchester and in the 50s and 60s we were proud of the Manchester Guardian as an intelligent and informative national paper based in a provincial English city. The UK is so dominated by London, that the Manchester Guardian’s development and survival in a town other than London was something of a minor miracle. The spelling mistakes that resulted in Private Eye christening it the Grauniad came from the hot metal process and the lack time available to get the printed paper down to the South East of England. The ever increasing consolidation of every UK institution into London finally sucked the Guardian in and the rot seemed to set in.
But even now I don’t think it is all bad. The Guardian pushed the parliamentary bribes scandal into the spotlight and did the same with the NSA spying allegations. The Guardian has played a major role in exposing the style of UK journalism that was developed by News International, resulting in the current court cases. In several areas, its campaigning has been effective and beneficial. But it is not a source of accurate facts and detailed reporting any more. Too much of the straight news is always coloured by opinion. And on scientific issues it can be pathetic. Science news isn’t suited to the “todays news is tomorrow fish and chips wrapper” operation that is a daily newspaper. Climate change, whatever that is , can not really be the subject of new articles and editorial every day or even week. Once a month would be appropriate for a heavyweight analysis of any new research or information.
So I stick with it but I am keenly aware of its limitations.